Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  “Ever heard of a time lock?” Vanning asked, his eyes watchful. “You’re right; I put the suitcase in a concealed safe. But I can’t open that safe till a certain number of hours have passed.”

  “Mm-m.” MacIlson pondered. “When—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “All right. You’ll have the bonds for me then?”

  “If you want them. But you’d better change your mind. It’d be safer.”

  For answer MacIlson grinned over his shoulder as he went out. Vanning sat motionless for a long time. He was, frankly, scared.

  The trouble was, MacIlson was a manic-depressive type. He’d kill. Right now, he was cracking under the strain, and imagining himself a desperate fugitive. Well—precautions would be advisable.

  Vanning called Gallegher again, but got no answer. He left a message on the recorder and thoughtfully looked into the locker again. It was empty, depressingly so.

  ———

  That evening Gallegher let Vanning into his laboratory. The scientist looked both tired and drunk. He waved comprehensively toward a table, covered with scraps of paper.

  “What a headache you gave me! If I’d known the principles behind that gadget, I’d have been afraid to tackle it. Sit down. Have a drink. Got the fifty credits?”

  Silently Vanning handed over the coupons. Gallegher shoved them into Monstro. “Fine. Now—” He settled himself on the couch. “Now we start. The fifty-credit question.”

  “Can I get the suitcase back?”

  “No,” Gallegher said flatly. “At least, I don’t see how it can be worked. It’s in another spatiotemporal sector.”

  “Just what does that mean?”

  “It means the locker works something like a telescope, only the thing isn’t merely visual. The locker’s a window, I figure. You can reach through it as well as look through it. It’s an opening into Now plus x.”

  Vanning scowled. “So far you haven’t said anything.”

  “So far all I’ve got is theory, and that’s all I’m likely to get. Look. I was wrong originally. The things that went into the locker didn’t appear in another space because there would have been a spatial constant. I mean, they wouldn’t have got smaller. Size is size. Moving a one-inch cube from here to Mars wouldn’t make it any larger or smaller.”

  “What about a different density in the surrounding medium? Wouldn’t that crush an object?”

  “Sure, and it’d stay squashed. It wouldn’t return to its former size and shape when it was taken out of the locker again. X plus y never equal xy. But x times y—”

  “So?”

  “That’s a pun,” Gallegher broke off to explain. “The things we put in the locker went into time. Their time-rate remained constant, but not the spatial relationships. Two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Ergo, your suitcase went into a different time. Now plus x. And what x represents I don’t know, though I suspect a few million years.”

  Vanning looked dazed. “The suitcase is a million years in the future?”

  “Dunno how far, but—I’d say plenty. I haven’t enough factors to finish the equation. I reasoned by induction, mostly, and the results are screwy as hell. Einstein would have loved it. My theorem shows that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time.”

  “What’s that got to do—”

  “Motion is relative,” Gallegher continued inexorably. “That’s a basic principle. Well, the universe is expanding, spreading out like a gas, but its component parts are shrinking at the same time. The parts don’t actually grow, you know—not the suns and atoms. They just run away from the central point. Galloping off in all directions . . . where was I? Oh. Actually, the universe, taken as a unit, is shrinking.”

  “So it’s shrinking. Where’s my suitcase?”

  “I told you. In the future. Deductive reasoning showed that. It’s beautifully simple and logical. And it’s quite impossible of proof, too. A hundred, a thousand, a million years ago the Earth—the universe—was larger than it is now. And it continues to contract. Sometime in the future the Earth will be just half as small as it is now. Only we won’t notice it because the universe will be proportionately smaller.”

  Gallegher went on dreamily. “We put a workbench into the locker, so it emerged sometime in the future. The locker’s an open window into a different time, as I told you. Well, the bench was affected by the conditions of that period. It shrank, after we gave it a few seconds to soak up the entropy or something. Do I mean entropy? Allah knows. Oh, well.”

  “It turned into a pyramid.”

  “Maybe there’s geometric distortion, too. Or it might be a visual illusion. Perhaps we can’t get the exact focus. I doubt if things will really look different in the future—except that they’ll be smaller—but we’re using a window into the fourth dimension. We’re taking a pleat in time. It must be like looking through a prism. The alteration in size is real, but the shape and color are altered to our eyes by the fourth-dimensional prism.”

  “The whole point, then, is that my suitcase is in the future. Eh? But why did it disappear from the locker?”

  “What about that little creature you squashed? Maybe he had pals. They wouldn’t be visible till they came into the very narrow focus of the whatchmacallit, but—figure it out. Sometime in the future, in a hundred or a thousand or a million years, a suitcase suddenly appears out of thin air. One of our descendants investigates. You kill him. His pals come along and carry the suitcase away, out of range of the locker. In space it may be anywhere, and the time factor’s an unknown quantity. Now plus x. It’s a time locker. Well?”

  “Hell!” Vanning exploded. “So that’s all you can tell me? I’m supposed to chalk it up to profit and loss?”

  “Uh-huh. Unless you want to crawl into the locker yourself after the suitcase. God knows where you’d come out, though. The composition of the air probably would have changed in a few thousand years. There might be other alterations, too.”

  “I’m not that crazy.”

  ———

  So there he was. The bonds were gone, beyond hope of redemption. Vanning could resign himself to that loss, once he knew the securities wouldn’t fall into the hands of the police. But MacIlson was another matter, especially after a bullet spattered against the glassolex window of Vanning’s office.

  An interview with MacIlson had proved unsatisfactory. The defaulter was convinced that Vanning was trying to bilk him. He was removed forcibly, yelling threats. He’d go to the police—he’d confess—

  Let him. There was no proof. The hell with him. But, for safety’s sake, Vanning clapped an injunction on his quondam client.

  It didn’t land. MacIlson clipped the official on the jaw and fled. Now, Vanning suspected, he lurked in dark corners, armed, and anxious to commit suicide. Obviously a manic-depressive type.

  Vanning took a certain malicious pleasure in demanding a couple of plainclothes men to act as his guards. Legally, he was within his rights, since his life had been threatened. Until MacIlson was under sufficient restriction, Vanning would be protected. And he made sure that his guards were two of the best shots on the Manhattan force.

  He also found out that they had been told to keep their eyes peeled for the missing bonds and the suedette suitcase. Vanning televised Counsel Hatton and grinned at the screen.

  “Any luck yet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My watchdogs. Your spies. They won’t find the bonds, Hatton. Better call ’em off. Why make the poor devils do two jobs at once?”

  “One job would be enough. Finding the evidence. If MacIlson drilled you, I wouldn’t be too unhappy.”

  “Well, I’ll see you in court,” Vanning said. “You’re prosecuting Watson, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Are you waiving scop?”

  “On the jurors? Sure. I’ve got this case in the bag.”

  “That’s what you think,” Hatton said, and broke the beam.

  Chuckling, Vanning donn
ed his topcoat, collected the guards, and headed for court. There was no sign of MacIlson—

  Vanning won the case, as he had expected. He returned to his offices, collected a few unimportant messages from the switchboard girl, and walked toward his private suite. As he opened the door, he saw the suedette suitcase on the carpet in one corner.

  He stopped, hand frozen on the latch. Behind him he could hear the heavy footsteps of the guards. Over his shoulder Vanning said, “Wait a minute,” and dodged into the office, slamming and locking the door behind him. He caught the tail end of a surprised question.

  The suitcase. There it was, unequivocally. And, quite as unequivocally, the two plainclothes men, after a very brief conference, were hammering on the door, trying to break it down.

  Vanning turned green. He took a hesitant step forward, and then saw the locker, in the corner to which he had moved it. The time locker—

  That was it. If he shoved the suitcase inside the locker, it would become unrecognizable. Even if it vanished again, that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was the vital importance of getting rid—immediately!—of incriminating evidence.

  The door rocked on its hinges. Vanning scuttled toward the suitcase and picked it up. From the corner of his eye he saw movement.

  In the air above him, a hand had appeared. It was the hand of a giant, with an immaculate cuff fading into emptiness. Its huge fingers were reaching down—

  Vanning screamed and sprang away. He was too slow. The hand descended, and Vanning wriggled impotently against the palm.

  The hand contracted into a fist. When it opened, what was left of Vanning dropped squashily to the carpet, which it stained.

  The hand withdrew into nothingness. The door fell in and the plainclothes men stumbled over it as they entered.

  ———

  It didn’t take long for Hatton and his cohorts to arrive. Still, there was little for them to do except clean up the mess. The suedette bag, containing twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable bonds, was carried off to a safer place. Vanning’s body was scraped up and removed to the morgue. Photographers flashed pictures, fingerprint experts insufflated their white powder, X-ray men worked busily. It was all done with swift efficiency, so that within an hour the office was empty and the door sealed.

  Thus there were no spectators to witness the advent of a gigantic hand that appeared from nothingness, groped around as though searching for something, and presently vanished once more—

  The only person who could have thrown light on the matter was Gallegher, and his remarks were directed to Monstro, in the solitude of his laboratory. All he said was:

  “So that’s why that workbench materialized for a few minutes here yesterday. Hm-m-m. Now plus x—and x equals about a week. Still, why not? It’s all relative. But—I never thought the universe was shrinking that fast!”

  He relaxed on the couch and siphoned a double martini.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” he murmured after a while. “Whew! I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and—killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.”

  And he did.

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  A sense of the cosmic underlies much of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and manifests in a variety of forms: the computer-accelerated working out of prophecy in “The Nine Billion Names of God”; the sentient telecommunications network given the spark of life in “Dial F for Frankenstein”; and the mysterious extraterrestrial overseers guiding human destiny in the novelization of his screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke’s best-known story, 2001, and its sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three, represent the culmination of ideas on man’s place in the universe introduced in his 1951 story, “The Sentinel,” and elaborated more fully in Childhood’s End, his elegiac novel on humankind’s maturation as a species and ascent to a greater purpose in the universal scheme.

  Clarke grounds the cosmic mystery of these stories in hard science. Degreed in physics and mathematics, Clarke was a contributor to numerous scientific journals and first proposed the idea for the geosynchronous orbiting communications satellite in 1945. Some of his best known work centers around the solution to a scientific problem or enigma. A Fall of Moondust tells of efforts to rescue a ship trapped under unusual conditions on the lunar surface. The Fountains of Paradise concerns the engineering problems encountered building an earth elevator to supply orbiting space stations. His Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning Rendezvous with Rama extrapolated his solid scientific inquiry into provocative new territory, telling of the human discovery of an apparently abandoned alien space ship and human attempts to understand its advanced scientific principles. Clarke’s other novels include Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Imperial Earth, and The Deep Range, a futuristic exploration of undersea life in terms similar to his speculations on space travel. He has written the novels Islands in the Sky and Dolphin Island for young readers, and his short fiction has been collected in Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales from the White Hart, The Wind from the Sun, and others. His numerous books of nonfiction include his award-winning The Exploration of Space, and the autobiographical Astounding Days. Clarke was knighted in 2000.

  The plot of traveling back to prehistoric times, particularly to the time of the dinosaur, followed soon after the first time travel stories were written. Arthur C. Clarke’s cunningly plotted story extrapolates one of these encounters both from the present point of view and, at the same time, millions of years in the past. His story also gives rise to the idea that perhaps prehistoric creatures wouldn’t be as afraid of man as one might think.

  TIME’S ARROW

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  THE RIVER WAS DEAD and the lake already dying when the monster had come down the dried-up watercourse and turned onto the desolate mud-flats. There were not many places where it was safe to walk, and even where the ground was hardest the great pistons of its feet sank a foot or more beneath the weight they carried. Sometimes it had paused, surveying the landscape with quick, birdlike movements of its head. Then it had sunk even deeper into the yielding soil, so that fifty million years later men could judge with some accuracy the duration of its halts.

  For the waters had never returned, and the blazing sun had baked the mud to rock. Later still the desert had poured over all this land, sealing it beneath protecting layers of sand. And later—very much later—had come Man.

  ———

  “Do you think,” shouted Barton above the din, “that Professor Fowler became a palaeontologist because he likes playing with pneumatic drills? Or did he acquire the taste afterward?”

  “Can’t hear you!” yelled Davis, leaning on his shovel in a most professional manner. He glanced hopefully at his watch.

  “Shall I tell him it’s dinnertime? He can’t wear a watch while he’s drilling, so he won’t know any better.”

  “I doubt if it will work,” Barton shrieked. “He’s got wise to us now and always adds an extra ten minutes. But it will make a change from this infernal digging.”

  With noticeable enthusiasm the two geologists downed tools and started to walk toward their chief. As they approached, he shut off the drill and relative silence descended, broken only by the throbbing of the compressor in the background.

  “About time we went back to camp, Professor,” said Davis, wristwatch held casually behind his back. “You know what cook says if we’re late.”

  Professor Fowler, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., mopped some, but by no means all, of the ocher dust from his forehead. He would have passed anywhere as a typical navvy, and the occasional visitors to the site seldom recognized the Vice-President of the Geological Society in the brawny, half-naked workman crouching over his beloved pneumatic drill.

  It had taken nearly a month to clear the sandstone down to the surface of the petrified mud-flats. In that time several hundred square feet had been exposed, revealing a frozen snapshot of the past that was probably the finest yet discovered
by palaeontology. Some scores of birds and reptiles had come here in search of the receding water, and left their footsteps as a perpetual monument eons after their bodies had perished. Most of the prints had been identified, but one—the largest of them all—was new to science. It belonged to a beast which must have weighed twenty or thirty tons: and Professor Fowler was following the fifty-million-year-old spoor with all the emotions of a big-game hunter tracking his prey. There was even a hope that he might yet overtake it; for the ground must have been treacherous when the unknown monster went this way and its bones might still be near at hand, marking the place where it had been trapped like so many creatures of its time.

  Despite the mechanical aids available, the work was very tedious. Only the upper layers could be removed by the power tools, and the final uncovering had to be done by hand with the utmost care. Professor Fowler had good reason for his insistence that he alone should do the preliminary drilling, for a single slip might cause irreparable harm.

  The three men were halfway back to the main camp, jolting over the rough road in the expedition’s battered jeep, when Davis raised the question that had been intriguing the younger men ever since the work had begun.

  “I’m getting a distinct impression,” he said, “that our neighbors down the valley don’t like us, though I can’t imagine why. We’re not interfering with them, and they might at least have the decency to invite us over.”

  “Unless, of course, it is a war research plant,” added Barton, voicing a generally accepted theory.

  “I don’t think so,” said Professor Fowler mildly. “Because it so happens that I’ve just had an invitation myself. I’m going there tomorrow.”

  ———

  If his bombshell failed to have the expected result, it was thanks to his staff’s efficient espionage system. For a moment Davis pondered over this confirmation of his suspicions; then he continued with a slight cough:

  “No one else has been invited, then?”

  The Professor smiled at his pointed hint. “No,” he said. “It’s a strictly personal invitation. I know you boys are dying of curiosity but, frankly, I don’t know any more about the place than you do. If I learn anything tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about it. But at least we’ve found out who’s running the establishment.”